Miles acquires WeShare car-sharing services from VW
On 1 November, Volkswagen’s electric car-sharing service WeShare was acquired by Miles Mobility. At the same time, Miles has ordered more than 10,000 electric cars from the Audi, Seat, Cupra and VW brands, which are to be delivered from 2023 onwards.
In the course of the “partnership”, in which Miles Mobility acquired the company UMI Urban Mobility International GmbH from Volkswagen Passenger Cars, WeShare will be integrated into Miles’ customer offering. Both sides have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
Miles is currently active in Berlin, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Potsdam. In autumn this year, two new locations were added: Brussels and Ghent. The Miles fleet currently consists of over 9,000 vehicles – around 70 per cent of which come from the Volkswagen Group. These are not exclusively electric vehicles. As part of the future integration, it is planned that “the Miles fleet will continue to develop along the lines of the electrification of the Volkswagen Group”. WeShare, on the other hand, currently operates around 2,000 Volkswagen ID.3 and ID.4 at its Berlin and Hamburg locations, with a total of more than 200,000 users.
“New mobility services such as car subscription models and car sharing are enjoying strong demand,” says Dr Christian Dahlheim, Chairman of the Board of Volkswagen Financial Services AG, which holds consolidated responsibility for the Volkswagen Group’s core activities in the field of mobility solutions. “This is a trend in which we would like to participate more.” Dahlheim said that carsharing ist to become available to an even broader spectrum of customers with a “strong partner to operate the fleet” and with vehicles from various Volkswagen Group brands. He also explained that the MILES portfolio will also be bookable via the Volkswagen mobility platform. “WeShare customers will then benefit from car-sharing services in eight German cities,” he explained.
The acquisition represents yet another German carmaker parting with its carsharing business. BMW and Mercedes-Benz already sold their joint car-sharing business Share Now to the Stellantis mobility subsidiary Free2Move in the summer. Renault has made turned extra focus to car-sharing services and has made this a strong target in part of its Mobilize offering.
According to Miles, the car-sharing service WeShare will continue as usual for the time being. In the coming weeks, the WeShare vehicles and customers are to be integrated into the Miles system. Besides the additional six new German cities and two Belgian cities for Miles, the car-sharing service is introducing new features of city-to-city rides and what it describes as “trips abroad,” without eloborating further.
Miles was recently part of an initiative in the city of Hamburg, Germany, where the car-sharing company joined Share Now, Sixt and WeShare in an agreement to increase the share of electric vehicles in their fleets to at least 80 per cent by the turn of the year 2023/24.
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